This is the start of the stable review cycle for the 3.18.49 release.
There are 145 patches in this series, all will be posted as a response
to this one. If anyone has any issues with these being applied, please
let me know.

---------
Wait, what? 3.18? Wasn't that kernel dead and forgotten and left to
rot on the side of the road? Yes, it was, but unfortunately, there's a
few million or so devices out there in the wild that still rely on this
kernel. Now, some of their manufacturers and SoC vendors might not be
keeping their kernels up to date very well, but some do actually care
about security and their users, so this release is for them. If you
happen to have a vendor that does not care about their users, go
complain, as odds are, your device is very insecure right now...

Because of this strange situation, and thanks to some vendors backing
the effort[1], I'll keep 3.18-stable alive in a semi-active mode, doing
releases every once in a while to keep it up to date and working well
based on what is happening in other more well-maintained stable kernels
(hint, use 4.4 or 4.9 or newer PLEASE, if your vendor refuses to do so,
switch vendors, it's the only way they will learn...) I don't know how
long I'll keep doing this, so if you care about 3.18, please contact me
to let me know the expected lifespan of your device.

And finally, due to the delay from the last 3.18-stable kernel release,
there is a large backlog of patches, this is about 1/2 of the pending
ones so far. I'll be working on catching up to the rest of them over
the next few weeks, and then the updates should be smaller than this
one.

Responses should be made by Tue Apr 18 08:01:19 UTC 2017.
Anything received after that time might be too late.

The whole patch series can be found in one patch at:
kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/stable-review/patch-3.18.49-rc1.gz
or in the git tree and branch at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable-rc.git linux-3.18.y
and the diffstat can be found below.